The Electric Sheep Screen-Saver:
A Case Study in Aesthetic Evolution

Scott Draves

Spotworks, San Francisco CA, USA

Electric Sheep is a distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle
computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and
evolving artificial life-forms known as sheep. The votes of
the users form the basis for the fitness function for a genetic
algorithm on a space of fractal animations. Users also may design
sheep by hand for inclusion in the gene pool. This paper describes
the system and its algorithms, and reports statistics from 11 weeks of
operation. The data indicate that Electric Sheep functions more as an
amplifier of its human collaborators' creativity rather than as a
traditional genetic algorithm that optimizes a fitness function.